Looking for Bhairava - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

144Pacific Worldfor roughly half of the output. Further, while most of these werepreviously untranslated, a significant portion of the translators’ workinvolved retranslation. The Institute continued to put out translationsfor another six decades after Dharmadeva, Dānapāla, and Devaśāntikaleft the scene. Even excluding the shorter dhāraṇī texts, over half ofthe translations of these four monks were of “esoteric” materials—including considerable material related to the siddha movement andthe cult of the cemetery. How were these texts received? What becameof them?Jan Yün-hua’s pioneering “Buddhist Relations between India andSung China” (1966) argued that the Song translations failed to make animpact and offered a variety of reasons, including Chinese Buddhism’sown “sectarian growth,” government control of translation, andchanges affecting Buddhism elsewhere in Asia—particularly “therise of Tantrism and the general deterioration of the religion in Indiaand Centra Asia due to the spread of Islam.” 23 Building on Jan’s work,Tansen Sen has problematized and updated some of these conclusionsin “The Revival and Failure of Buddhist Translations during the SongDynasty.” 24 Sen questions the utility of the decline narrative (bothfor India and for Song China) and focuses on the importance of theSong translations in state-to-state relations on the continent. On thequestion of their internal impact Sen argues that “shifting doctrinalinterest among the members of the Chinese Buddhist communitytoward indigenous schools and practices rendered most of the newtranslations and their contents obsolete in China.” 25 There is much torecommend this thesis and overall I am in agreement with it, but thereare still some unresolved issues. The dismissal of the Song translationsas a “failure” begs the question while overlooking important evidenceconcerning the internal impact of the products of the Institute.Sen, like Jan, points out that the new Song translations appeared tohave stimulated little or no exegetical work, and he argues that the lackof commentary is evidence that the new translations had no impact. 26Indeed, the issue of commentary is an important albeit complicatedone, as commentaries sometimes play a role in lineage formation. Manycommentaries in Chinese Buddhism are philosophically or doctrinallyoriented expositions of the meaning of a text. Thus, for instance, the greatCommentary on the Mahāvairocana-sūtra produced by Śubhākarasiṃhaand Yixing in the mid-Tang has considerable interest in doctrinal ormetaphysical topics and may have been related to efforts at lineage